The Strange Story Of A Washington Man Who Decided To Start Killing Sex Offenders

On a morning last fall, Patrick Drum sat quietly
in his black and white striped uniform and handcuffs as he
awaited his fate. The sleeves of his top were short enough to
reveal a tattoo reading “Win Some” on his right forearm and one
reading “Lose Sum” on the left. From the court’s gallery where
dozens of reporters and community members sat, he seemed barely
to move as the families of the two men he had killed four months
before came forward to speak.

“The only thing I’ll say is I don’t has no sympathy for the
man who shot and killed my son,” said Jerry Ray’s father, Paul,
his voice breaking. The wife of the other victim, Gary Blanton,
said Drum’s followers were harassing her and her family—spitting
at them, parking at night outside her home. “Tell your supporters
to stop,” she said. “My children and I don’t deserve this… I
think we’ve suffered enough.”

As far as Drum was concerned, he had been protecting the
community’s children.

Prosecutor Deb Kelly recommended life in prison without the
possibility of parole for the murders, plus time for burglary and
unlawful possession of a firearm. “What Mr. Drum has done
diminishes us all,” she said. “There is no room for vigilantism.
There is no room for what he has done. And no one in authority
will ever tolerate vigilantism. It will be sought out, those who
commit it will be sought out. They will be sought—“

Drum interrupted her. “This country was founded on vigilantism,”
he said.

Kelly ignored him and continued. “You piece of shit,” someone
from the galley called to Drum.

The defense attorney spoke briefly. Drum rose and curtly
apologized for the hurt caused to the families, asking his
supporters to leave them alone. “As for the men themselves,” he
said, speaking of his victims, “actions speak louder than words.”

The judge gave Drum a sentence of life without parole. “See you
in hell, fucker,” someone shouted as he departed. “Love you
guys,” Drum said to the crowd. “God bless you,” said another.

As far as Drum was concerned, he had been protecting the
community’s children when he murdered Paul Ray’s son and Leslie
Blanton’s husband. He may have killed two sex offenders in June
of that year, but he had set out to kill sixty more.

In the months after the killings, Drum’s case
had divided the small community. Both Sequim, where Drum and his
victims had lived at the time of the murders, and Port Angeles,
an adjacent town where Drum spent most of his life, lie in the
rain shadow of Washington’s Olympic Mountains and are relatively
small—just 7,000 and 19,000 residents, respectively. Mills
were the lifeblood of this area, but many closed during the worst
of the recession. A few years ago, Twilight fans flocked
to the region on pilgrimages to the nearby city of Forks, the
main setting of the fantasy novels and films, but
Twilight tourism eventually tapered off. Off the main
highways, large houses are mixed in with cabins and shacks. There
are horses fenced in on private properties, fields and apple
trees, snow-capped mountains and the cool waters of the Strait of
Juan de Fuca.

Everyone knew about the murders. Many residents showed their
support by writing letters and showing up at court. Some said
they had been raped and that Drum was their hero. Courtroom
spectators would yell things like “Way to go!” during
proceedings.

As stories of the murders were posted online, comments from
readers around the country poured in. Drum was a star and a hero.
Drum had no right to play God. He had watched too much
television. How could anyone support a murderer? How could anyone
support a sex offender? Where could they send Drum money? More
still seemed unsure how to feel: They disliked sex offenders, but
didn’t know if murder was the solution.

To those who supported Drum, any ethical objections to murder
were outweighed by the need to protect children. Discussing the
case online, one reader commented, “If it were my child, I would
[…] think of [Drum] as a hero…sex offenses can be a life long
agony and pain.” Another wrote simply, “Looks like he took out
the trash.” A man interviewed on camera outside the Clallam
County Courthouse said, “I honestly feel that it was justified.”

In fact, Drum’s crime wasn’t as unusual as it seemed. Between 15
to 20 percent of convicted sex offenders report vigilantism or
harassment; According to Professor Jill Levenson of Lynn
University in Florida, about one-third of offenders lose their
jobs or homes, are harassed, or have property damaged because of
their status. In some cases, children grow up to attack those who
hurt them when they were young. In 2012, a man from San Jose, California, beat the
priest who allegedly raped him and his brother when they were
children. In other cases, the attackers have no connection to the
offenders, as in 2011 when a St. Louis man allegedly approached a
74-year-old neighbor whom he knew was a registered sex offender
and asked to borrow sugar. He allegedly attacked the man, who had
been charged with sexually abusing an 11-year-old girl in 1991,
with a hammer. He later told police that he was “doing God’s
work.”

Vigilantes, and especially those who target pedophiles, often
harbor a deep belief that they’re doing what’s necessary to
protect others from grave harm. “They think the state’s not doing
enough,” said Dr. Lisa Arellano, a historian and professor who
studies vigilantism at Colby College in Maine. “And I think those
two claims go hand in hand—the state isn’t doing enough to
protect your community, so you have to do something.”

Those who knew Drum from his years in Sequim
said he was the kind of person who wrote poetry and helped
neighbors learn how to send e-mails. Friends said Drum liked
being a mentor to young people, including two teenage boys who
Drum learned had been molested by Jerry Ray, one of the men Drum
would eventually kill. Drum said he knew the boys from the time
they were young, and took them fishing when they were teenagers.

While he was a student at a local community college, Drum started
a boxing team and, when he left the school, he coached youth
boxers in the area. “I got a vibe from him that he had had some
challenges in his life and he wanted to be a part of something
that kids in our community who had had a rough life, like his
perhaps, could have something to work on that was drug free and
alcohol free,” Point Peninsula College athletics director Rick
Ross said.

Drum spent much of his early life in and out of jail, mostly for
drug-related offenses. When he was released for the last time in
2009, he seemed to be making an honest effort at starting anew. A
stint at a homeless shelter led to a brief dish washing job and,
then, a job at Nash’s Organic Grocery as a farm laborer. Drum
worked there for three years while trying his hand bottling water
from Forks to sell to Twilight fans and creating an
uncommissioned logo for the Seattle Seahawks. Although his
ventures were commercially unsuccessful, a local paper profiled
him in 2011 as an inspiring example of an ex-felon getting back
on his feet. He was laid off from his farm job not long after,
but seemed to be holding things together.

Drum had become friends with Leslie Blanton (née Sheriff), a
thick woman with dark hair, in the early 2000s. They were both
involved in the drug scene of Port Angeles and became closer
after spending some time in rehab together. Leslie Blanton and
her boyfriend Gary Blanton Jr., a lanky young man who had been in
and out of prison after some violent encounters, both pled guilty
to kidnapping. They allegedly forced a girl into a car, kept her
in an apartment against her will and hit her in the head with
their hands and a frying pan. Gary Blanton was released first
and, when Leslie Blanton was released a couple years later, they
married.

The pair had two children together: Gary III, who was born in
2009, and Skylar, who was born in 2010. Blanton, Leslie says, was
a dedicated father, bringing her meals when she was pregnant and
reading to her stomach so the babies would get to know his voice.
As a husband, he helped her reform her life.

Yet something about Gary Blanton bothered Drum, who kept in touch
with the couple and came to dinner occasionally, bringing
groceries from the farm where he worked. When he was 17, Blanton
had pled guilty to raping a 17-year-old deaf/mute girl. Leslie
didn’t mind what had happened: Her husband had come clean with
her early in their relationship. (She would later say in court
that Gary had been caught having sex with the girl in public,
while his mother said he was set up by the girl and charged with
statutory rape. Because both Gary Blanton and the girl were
minors, details of the case are sealed.) But Drum withdrew from
them slightly after he found out.

In the summer of 2011, then-17-month-old Skylar was diagnosed
with a spiral fracture in his arm, a type of break that doctors
said would have required relatively great force unless he had a
bone disease, which he did not. The alternative was that someone
might have seized the baby forcefully by his arm while he was
lying down. Doctors also discovered another, 2-week-old fracture
on Skylar’s thighbone consistent with someone roughly grabbing
him by the arm and forcing him to kneel. In an email to a
detective, the doctor wrote, “In summary, Skylar is the victim of
child abuse, and at least the second injury, the upper arm
fracture, occurred at the hands of his father.”

The family contended that Gary hadn’t hurt the baby. But Blanton
was arrested, and released on bail on the condition that he stay
away from his children.

In May, Drum visited Blanton at Mandi Smith’s residence, where he
had been staying since he could no longer live at home. Drum
noticed Blanton “throwing his weight around,” eating Smith’s food
without asking, and saying things Drum found disrespectful.
Blanton also hadn’t packed up his belongings despite being asked
to leave. Drum asked Blanton about the situation, but was told to
butt out. At that point, Drum recalls jumping up and punching
Blanton in the face and, as Smith later told police, the two
started brawling. She called Leslie Blanton at work in hopes that
she could help but, by the time she showed up, the two men had
calmed down.

Afterward, Drum did something unusual. He asked Gary Blanton if
he’d like to stay with him in the cottage he rented in Sequim for
a while. Blanton accepted. Soon, he moved in, bringing his dog
with him.

Even though they were living apart, Leslie said she and her
husband still spoke on the phone daily. She remembered hearing
him and Drum joke together while they made dinner. She later
remarked that they seemed like old buddies. Though she noticed
Drum had barely been at home since Gary had moved in, and saw him
uncharacteristically driving a new, red Chevrolet Impala in place
of his usual older car, nothing seemed to be horribly amiss.

The accommodation seemed like a generous offer.

In fact, it was the first step in the plan Drum had been
contemplating for years. Only later would Drum admit that the
apparent generosity was a ruse. He stole a gun, planned an escape
route and started gathering the names and addresses of other sex
offenders in the area. “I invited him to move in with me rent
free as a way to get him to a secure location to execute him,”
Drum would later write from prison. “He took the bait.” The red
Impala had been rented as a getaway vehicle.

On the night of June 2, 2012, Gary Blanton was playing World of
Warcraft on his desktop computer. Blanton’s dog sat nearby while
he fought monsters and embarked on quests in his gray plaid
pajama bottoms.

Though Drum had been planning for this night for weeks, he still
spent most of the morning scrambling to get food and camping
supplies together. He was always running late.

While Blanton was immersed in his game, Drum slipped out of the
house and cut the power. Blanton was wearing a headset that let
him speak with other players and Drum didn’t want anyone online
to hear what was about to happen. Calming himself, Drum pulled
out a 9 mm pistol and charged inside. He hadn’t thought about how
hard it would be to hit Blanton in the dark and emptied the first
magazine wildly into the blackness before realizing he’d need
another. He dashed to get an extra from his car and to nab a
flashlight. When he re-entered, Blanton, riddled with bullets,
was on his cell phone. “Help, 9-1-1 I’m being shot,” Blanton
managed to say before the line went dead. Drum shone the light on
Blanton’s head and kept shooting.

Afterward, Drum led Blanton’s dog, scared and splattered with a
bit of Blanton’s blood but otherwise unscathed, into another room
before placing a letter titled “Declarations” and a lollipop with
a scorpion inside near Blanton’s body. The end of his note read:
“When I was younger I was at a pet shop. I saw these three
scorpions in [an] aquarium. One was a pregnant female and two
were males. As I approached, the female tucked into a protective
ball. The two males got in front of her in full battle ready
posture; tails up, claws out and open. Being young and curious I
played a game and used my hands to circle the aquarium in
different directions. Each male picked a hand and moved with it,
never leaving her side and staying between the hand and her. This
spirit always impressed me.” It was signed with his name.

Drum grabbed a backpack stuffed with a thumb drive, camouflage
clothes, a map, supplies for living on the run, and a plastic bag
full of pot. Then, he left. He carried a list of 60 names and
addresses of sex offenders. Drum picked those who had been
charged with rape or other serious crimes. He didn’t want to
target someone who was on the list for peeing in public or
another minor offense. They lived in Forks, Sequim, Quilcene—all
towns on the Peninsula. They were all in his sights, but first
Drum had someone particular in mind.

Jerry
RayClallam County Sheriff's
Office

It was around sunrise when Drum came to the home of his next
target. Jerry Ray, a tall 57-year-old man with a graying mustache
and glasses, lived with and cared for his elderly father, Paul.
Jerry Ray was born in Mississippi, but spent much of his life in
California, including a stint in the Army in Fort Ord in the
mid-1970s. He had had two marriages, one of which ended in
divorce and the other in separation, and had three children. Of
his son, Paul Ray would later say, “Jerry wasn’t no angel.”

In 2002, Jerry Ray was found guilty of having stripped naked,
carrying the 7 and 4-year-old grandchildren of his friends (the
boys Drum said he walked across the street and took on fishing
trips) into a bedroom, and molesting them. Jerry Ray later told
police he was drunk and barely remembered the evening, but
admitted that he had acted on a strange urge. He served four
years of jail time and underwent sex offender therapy as well as
rehab for alcoholism, although he struggled with his addiction
until his death.

After his release from prison, a back injury prevented Jerry Ray
from working and so he spent his time shopping for groceries,
taking his father to doctor’s appointments, and keeping busy
around their house with their three Pekingese dogs, black Persian
cat, and gray and white parakeet named Tweety. He also took care
of his mother until she died of Alzheimer’s.

Drum had been waiting for years for the moment when he would get
revenge on this man who molested the children he knew. He had had
plans to come to Jerry Ray’s home and stab him on New Year’s Eve
before his arrest in 2005 for burglary. “I am close friends with
the family and what I did was long overdue,” he would write
later, adding that they had no idea that he was planning to hurt
Ray. But, now, on the porch of the Ray home, Drum hesitated. He
had heard that Jerry Ray was ex-military and it wasn’t uncommon
for people in this rural area to have guns. He tried knocking,
hoping Jerry Ray would answer the door so Drum could shoot him
and make a quick escape. Nobody answered. Leaving his rental car
in the Rays’ driveway, Drum went for a walk to calm his nerves.

While many people assume sex offenders are
incurable, Justice Department statistics show that the overall
recidivism rates for sex offenders, including pedophiles, are
actually lower than those for other violent crimes. Still, sex
offenders are four times more likely to be rearrested for a sex
crime, meaning that the stereotypes we have about them being
shadowy characters who continue hurting others sometimes play out
as expected. These are the moments that burn in our minds.

Two major cases surfaced in the first half of March of this year
alone. In the first, an Indiana man convicted of multiple violent
felonies, including rape, strangled and raped a 17-year-old girl
in her apartment. Not long after, a sex offender jailed in
California for failing to register (he had been convicted for
molesting a minor) was released because of overcrowding. Three
days later, he raped and killed his own grandmother.

In fact, what spurred much of the sex offender registration
reform was a crime similar to these—the 1994 murder of 7-year-old
Megan Kanka in New Jersey. Megan, who had light brown hair and
round cheeks, was lured to a male neighbor’s house with a promise
that she could see his new puppy. Once she was in his grasp, the
neighbor raped Megan and strangled her with a belt. He placed her
body into a wooden trunk, assaulting her corpse once more as he
did so, before dumping her in a local park. The next day, this
man confessed what he had done. He had two previous convictions
for sexually assaulting little girls, but had spent less than
seven years total in prison. Today, the federal online sex
offender registration requirement is often referred to as Megan’s
Law.

These cases are shocking for anyone but, for someone who was
sexually abused as a child, hearing about these stories can
trigger serious, psychological reactions. “It is very common that
hearing about a child being victimized or hearing about a
molester living in the neighborhood would trigger a lot of the
old feelings and perhaps memories about what happened to the
victim,” said Dr. Carolyn Knight, professor of social work at the
University of Maryland in Baltimore County and the author of
Working with Adult Survivors of Childhood Trauma. Some
who have experienced abuse in childhood, particularly men, are
prone to turning these emotions outward, sometimes violently.
“Physically targeting child molesters is probably very, very rare
and unusual,” Knight said. “But the dynamic is not uncommon.”

Drum wandered outside until dawn, collecting his
thoughts before he walked back to the Ray home. Drum had read
that people were in their deepest sleep then, and figured it
would be the easiest time to attack. On the front porch for the
second time, Drum slammed the front door in and charged through
the living room, past Tweety screeching madly in his cage, down
the hall decorated with family photos to meet Jerry Ray, who had
emerged from his room because of the commotion.

“What’s going on?” Jerry Ray said. Drum fired his pistol and hit
Ray in the stomach. Ray stumbled back and tried to dash back into
his room and toward the dresser. Whether he was trying to get to
a gun or make it to his bedroom window, he couldn’t escape in
time. Bang, Drum hit him in the back. Ray dropped to the floor.
Bang, Drum hit him again. The only sound Jerry Ray made as he
crumbled to the ground was a short, “Ahh.”

Paul Ray was asleep in a nearby room when his son was shot. He
would have gotten up, he said, but he thought the noise was just
the sound of the dogs playing in the hall and slamming into his
door, which they often did.

Drum left a note and lollipop identical to the one by Blanton’s
body in the family’s mailbox.

After killing Jerry Ray, Drum ditched his rental car in the woods
and took to his route by foot. He hitched a ride with a trucker
heading toward Blue Mountain Road, which begins at Highway 101
and winds up toward the Olympic Mountain range. There are few
homes along this route and Drum hoped to make it to a cleared
trail under a strip of power lines that would take him to
Quilecene, where his next target lived.

Little did Drum know, Paul Ray had found his son and contacted
the police. Checkpoints had been deployed along a number of
streets, including Blue Mountain Road, to ask drivers if they had
seen a suspicious person. When Drum saw patrol ahead, he told the
driver to pull over and bolted into the forest. It was that
driver who tipped off the police that Drum was in their midst.

Soon, about 65 cops and Border Patrol officers were deployed for
the manhunt.

The plan was to flush Drum out of the woods by boxing him in and
giving him two choices: flee to the mountains where there were no
roads to travel by and where he couldn’t hurt anyone, or fall
into their grasp.

Drum tried to stay hidden, but a homeowner saw him pass by and
notified the police. A half hour later, a Border Patrol agent
spotted Drum near a driveway. A small group of cops chased and
tackled him.

Later, Drum admitted that his plan had been to live in the wild
and continue attacking sex offenders as long as he could manage.
“I was going to have no communication with the grid—no informants
to worry about and nothing to trace to a network,” he wrote in a
letter. “For food, I intended on hitting the farm fields [where I
had worked] at night. Spring and summer is the easiest time for
such a life. I knew I could survive early fall. Late fall and
winter, if still free, I would have holed up in a secluded
abandoned house.”

Drum's arrest in Port Angeles, Washington, on June 3,
2012Clallam County Sheriff's
Office

As the cops led Drum toward the squad cars on Blue Mountain Road,
Drum turned to them and commended them on a job well done. He
didn’t think they’d catch him so quickly. Clallam County Sergeant
Nick Turner said Drum walked with a swagger, as if he expected to
be caught. As if he was proud of what he’d done. Yet, when Drum
was taken down to the station, he said killing was not like he
had expected, adding that it doesn’t happen easily like it does
on television.

Although Drum initially asked to represent himself in court, he
ultimately decided to plead guilty and forego a trial. He said he
came to the realization that it would be a waste of tax dollars.

Prosecutor Kelly considered trying Drum for the death penalty,
but changed her mind. When later asked why, Kelly said there were
two factors. For one, he had unusual support both in the county
and online. She doubted that she could convince 12 jurors to give
Drum a death sentence. Sex offenders are not the easiest to
empathize with, even if they’ve been murdered in cold blood. The
other factor was Drum’s history of drug abuse. The immediate
effects of toluene are depressant or excitatory, but the
long-term effects include paranoid psychosis, hallucinations and
damage to the brain. Drum’s history of toluene abuse might have
impacted his decision-making skills, Kelly said. And, although he
claimed he was clean and only had a single beer on the night of
the murders, blood work showed Drum had toluene in his system,
which meant that he was using within a couple weeks of the
crimes.

Drum’s childhood in Port Angeles and, briefly,
in Northern California was far from idyllic. His parents, both
drug addicts, had him about one year after their two other sons
were put into foster care, and divorced soon thereafter. His
father, violent and only sporadically mentally present due to his
drug and alcohol use, remarried. As a kid, Drum remembers
stealing his father’s toluene—a solvent that Drum’s mother had
abused while Drum was in utero—sparking an addiction that he
would struggle with throughout the rest of his life.

Drum learned quickly that adults, particularly men, could not be
trusted. His brother, Isaac, told police that his father was
volatile, but Drum later revealed more about the violence in the
household. He recalls his father spitting tobacco in his face for
doing something wrong, and also strangling him unconscious in
front of friends. He remembers what it was like to have adults
watch as he writhed on the floor, doing nothing to save him. The
memories of seeing the sexual abuse are hazy, but Drum can still
recall the night when he was 6 years old and walked into the
living room. He remembers that his father was sitting on the
couch in a night robe. And he remembers seeing a teenage girl,
dressed in a long nightgown, straddling his father and, even
then, knowing what he was seeing was wrong. Drum’s father was
later convicted of statutory rape.

And later, after the trial and the media deluge, Drum
revealed a long-kept secret during a phone interview.

Drum spent time in the care of other family members and, when he
was 10 or 11, was staying with one of his uncles. Drum decided to
go for a walk around town by himself. He was coming of age and
was enjoying the freedom to do things independently. But, while
he was out, a man in his 30s saw him and asked if Drum would like
to go drinking. When Drum accepted, the man went to a nearby
liquor store and bought two big bottles of whiskey.

The pair went into the woods and, by the time things started to
get out of hand, Drum was too drunk to run away or even really
know what was happening. The man forced Drum to perform oral sex
and then forced oral sex on him. Drum didn’t know where the man
went afterward, only that he left. He managed to find his way out
of the woods and to the bus line that would take him near his
uncle’s home. Drunk and unable to walk, he crawled on hands and
knees toward the home. Someone in a car saw him and took him the
rest of the way.

Drum never spoke of what happened that day. He told a few close
friends that he had been molested as a child, but nothing more.
After the assault, Drum became very protective of others, mostly
women and children, almost to a fault. Once, when Drum was a
teenager, a girl from out of town started talking smack about
Port Angeles at a party. When the other partygoers threw beer
cans at her, Drum pulled out a knife and threatened everyone
there.

Through all the times Drum struggled with addiction and was
apprehended by the law, he doesn’t remember anyone asking him
much about why he found it so difficult to hold down a normal
life. No one in his family talked about what his father did to
that young woman and no one pushed Drum to acknowledge his
molestation—his family never suspected it. Even if his family had
addressed these problems, he doubts he would have talked to them
about it much.

“I stonewalled people all the time growing up,” Drum said. “I’m a
private person…most of my girlfriends would never even know about
my dad.”

He tried to ignore most of what he had seen and experienced, and
many people around him attributed his criminal behavior to his
drug use. The courts recommended that he to go through some
addiction treatment, but never followed up on it. He was never
forced to have a psychiatric evaluation or to go to therapy. No
one helped him confront his past. This lack of support is
incredibly common. “I can count on my one hand the number of
times I’ve worked with clients where the families have been
supportive of them,” Knight said. “The typical way is to deny,
deny, deny.”

Of course, most people who are sexually abused as children don’t
go on to kill pedophiles, and many are not violent. But Drum—with
his history of sexual abuse, lack of counseling, and protective
nature—was a ticking time bomb.

Knight has had clients who, as adults, fantasize about killing
the person who sexually assaulted them. She even had a client who
went to his perpetrator’s home with murderous intentions.
(“Luckily the perpetrator didn't answer the door,” she said. “I
think if he had, he probably would have shot him.”) But, often,
it’s not the assailants that victims are most angry with—it’s
those who stood by and did nothing.

Drum’s actions, in many ways, were making up for the inactions of
others, be it those who watched him struggle as his father abused
him or those who never caught his molester and brought him to
justice. “In a way, he’s over identified with the children,”
Knight said of Jerry Ray’s victims that Drum knew and of the
others he wanted to protect, “and stepping in where nobody
stepped in for him.”

Some called Drum a hero. But if anyone needed a hero to step in
and save him, it was Drum himself.

In the early 2000s, both of Drum’s parents died from
complications from toluene abuse. Just a couple of years later,
Drum heard about the sexually motivated murder of a girl named
Melissa Carter in Port Angeles. Her decomposing body was found in
a hollow near a popular trail the day after Christmas in 2004.
Police believed she was raped and then strangled to death. It was
at that moment that Drum decided he was going to kill sex
offenders. Not long after, having been arrested and
convicted of burglary, Drum met Michael Anthony Mullen. In the
summer of 2005, Mullen, dressed in a blue jumpsuit and FBI hat,
went to the Bellingham home of three convicted child molesters.
He said he was there to warn them of a vigilante who was preying
on sex offenders. Accustomed to routine check-ins from police,
the men were not suspicious. Mullen chatted them up and bought a
six-pack of beer so they could all drink and smoke Camels on the
patio together. Around 9 p.m., one of the offenders left for
work. When he returned later in the evening, he discovered that
his two housemates had been shot and killed. Mullen later said
that the man who left showed remorse for his crimes, while the
other two did not. About a week after the murders, Mullen turned
himself in.

“In time, we began formulating a plan to initiate upon my
release,” Drum wrote. “I was going to smuggle poisons to Mr.
Mullen so he could silently eliminate sex offenders in prison. I
began talking to other prisoners about how to obtain cyanide, how
to produce ricin, and how to obtain or produce nicotine sulfate.”

Mullen died—the official cause of death listed as pneumonia,
despite investigators’ original suspicions of
suicide—before the two could act on their plan. But Drum
felt empowered about his decision to kill sex offenders and soon
he was released from jail.

When I asked Drum about his motivations, he insisted that what he
did was for the betterment of the community. He said his decision
to kill Blanton was as much about the pending child abuse case as
it was about his sex offender status. He didn’t think of himself
as much different than a soldier killing insurgents abroad for a
cause. “I believe my experiences with sex offenders, my father
and abuse gave me firsthand empathy for the issue, but my actions
were not about me,” he wrote to me in a letter. “They were about
my community. I suffered many failures and my overall view of
things was one of hopelessness. I took that hopelessness and in
turn threw myself away to a purpose. I gave myself to something
bigger than myself.”

But, as we spoke on the phone, I listened to Drum describe his
father and then Blanton. The similarities were striking between
them—two men accused of crimes involving young women who had
histories of violence and child abuse. I asked Drum if he saw
aspects of his father in Blanton.

“Yes,” he said. “I definitely see aspects of him in Gary.”

About a week after his sentencing, Drum stabbed
a fellow inmate with a sharpened, plastic utensil. The
19-year-old sex offender, who survived the attack, was serving
time for failing to register. Drum wouldn’t know until later that
his victim had committed his sex offense when he was just 13
years old. Drum was soon moved to solitary. When he was released
into the general population months later, he fashioned a shiv
from a toothbrush and a razor blade and tried to kill another sex
offender in the gymnasium. Prison officers caught him before he
was able to seriously harm the man, who Drum said had raped a
male friend from Port Angeles. And, with that, he was back in
solitary indefinitely.

Six months after the murders, the cottage in Sequim that Drum and
Gary Blanton briefly shared was empty. Inside, the house was torn
apart, prepared for remodeling or demolition. The front yard was
overgrown with weeds and thin stubs of grass. The only signs of
what happened that summer were the bits of red police tape stuck
to the padlocks on the front and side doors.

Next door, a kayak rental store continued to do business. Across
the street, small birds flitted around a feeder. Workers down the
road at Nash’s Organic Grocery tended to the fields, as Drum once
did.

Drum is not happy to be in prison, but he seems
to feel at peace with his choices. He has heard of some
murderers, like Gary Ridgway the Green River Killer, who get
piles of fan mail, but he only receives about one letter a week,
and it is never from a fan. He works out and reads a lot. He has
begun collecting information about alternative sex offender
sentencing that allows offenders to be released faster if they
undergo treatment—which he believes helped knock off a
significant portion of the time Jerry Ray spent in prison—in
hopes that he can find someone to advocate against it on the
outside. Anytime he leaves his cell, his legs and arms are
shackled.

He doesn’t think much about his past, although he admits that the
man who assaulted him when he was a boy would have made the hit
list he carried with him as he killed Blanton and Ray. But Drum’s
feelings about his father are a bit more complicated. If he
hadn’t been his father, he would have certainly made the list,
but Drum isn’t particularly comfortable with the idea of
patricide.

What if someone else had killed his father? Drum doesn’t
hesitate. “I think he did things that deserved—that
merited—death,” he says. “I think he deserved that. I think
somebody should have.”